You be the Judge: The Case of the Kid and the Cash

An unmarried, absent father dies at work. Does his company have to pay to support his child?

By Vicki Glembocki

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Jessica Douglas gave birth to a baby girl named Jamie on April 22, 1998. Soon after, the pair moved in with Douglas’s boyfriend, Scott Moore, whom Douglas had been dating for some time. Though they all lived together in Moore’s Michigan home on and off for several months, Moore wasn’t entirely certain that he was Jamie’s father. In fact, he filed a complaint to determine the child’s paternity. Results from the DNA test came back at the beginning of September and proved that Moore was indeed Jamie’s dad. By then, however, Douglas and little Jamie had moved out. Though Moore no longer supported them financially, he was still, according to Douglas, “a father to [Jamie].”

Less than a month after he received the paternity results, Moore was working a job at an apartment complex for his employer, Prestige Painting. A gust of wind caused him to lose control of an aluminum extension ladder he was carrying, and the ladder touched an overhead power line. Moore was electrocuted. He died shortly after.

On behalf of her daughter, Douglas filed a petition to receive death benefits from Prestige Painting. In September 2002, a Workers’ Compensation Board magistrate ruled that Jamie was eligible for benefits, since, according to the Workers’ Disability Compensation Act, a child under the age of 16—whether legitimate or illegitimate, whether living with the deceased employee or not—“shall be conclusively presumed to be wholly dependent for support.” The magistrate awarded Douglas 500 weeks of benefits at $252.33 a week.

“The order was clearly in the best interest of the child,” says Douglas’s attorney, Allen Wall.

But within days, Prestige Painting appealed to the Workers’ Compensation Appellate Commission (WCAC). Attorney Robert W. Macy called the magistrate’s decision a “legal error” and cited a different statute in the same Compensation Act, which stated that a child had to be “living with” the employee at the time of death to be considered an eligible dependent.

Should Prestige Painting be required to pay death benefits to Scott Moore’s daughter even though the child wasn’t living with him when he died on the job? You be the judge.